A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for designing and/or authoring technical illustrations, as mounting or dismounting illustrations such as the one provided by Dassault Systèmes under the trademark 3D VIA® Composer.
These systems, mainly dedicated to non-CAD software users, allow a user to produce, for instance, technical illustrations, maintenance or training operations, assembly or disassembly instructions, marketing presentations, or interactive applications (like interactive parts catalogues . . . ).
In these systems, there exist some advanced tools to create exploded view of a 3D product, but none of them provide solutions for easily drawing exploded paths in 3D.
Indeed, making exploded paths is fastidious and time-consuming as many manual operations are necessary, either by manually linking or connecting points, or by using a set of broken lines for one piece.
An exploded view represents an assembly of objects spread out according to their relationship, in particular objects positioned to show how they fit together when assembled. An exploded path allows to represent links between objects of an exploded view of the assembly, notably to explain an order for mounting or dismounting these objects of the assembly.
Thus, it is difficult and time consuming to create one or several exploded paths on an exploded view of an assembly of three-dimensional modeled objects.